Maxwell’s House Liner Notes by Neil Tesser
Published on April 11th, 2010
Just to make it clear from the outset: at 33, Shawn Maxwell is too young have given this album its title.
It’s not that he’s too young to drink coffee, of which Maxwell House is a tried and true American example (founded in 1892). But Maxwell House – the best-selling brand in mid-20th-century America, famous for its slogan “Good to the last drop” (which began running in 1917) – doesn’t exactly resonate with people in their 20s and 30s. In the Age of Starbucks, with a generation weaned on Peet’s and Caribou and Intelligentsia, lots of Shawn Maxwell’s contemporaries have never even heard of Maxwell House Coffee.
At this point, not so many people have heard of Shawn Maxwell, either – but a couple more albums like this could change that. Maxwell’s House, his Chicago Sessions debut, shows off a sprightly but strong-willed style, which grows from his puckered, slightly acerbic, and often kaleidoscopic tone. His alto timbre sits in a lineage exemplified by past giansts like Jackie McLean and Eric Dolphy, and by such latter-day players as Arthur Blythe and Steve Slagle. Maxwell gets to all of them through his emulation of Kenny Garrett (one of the most admired contemporary altoists), who folds many of those influences into his own music.
“People either love it or hate it,” Maxwell says of his tone.
Hoe continues, “I had about a ten-year infatuation with Garrett’s playing; I really love his sound. I’d hook up for a lesson here and there when he came to town, and he told me about Hank Crawford. The first time I heard Crawford, I hated his sound. But the more I listened, the more I thought it was pretty cool, and then I got into the style of those players in general.”
Maxwell bases much of his approach to improvisation around his sound: although he can run bebop lines along with the rest, his solos tend to involve fewer, longer-held notes, the better to emphasize the three-dimensional facets of his tone. His songs serve a similar purpose, living in a mid-tempo range that lets his sound breathe deeply. Whether composed or improvised, Maxwell’s melodies have a keening urgency that starts with that sound, which imparts a steamroller intensity belied by his easygoing manner.
Case in point: the song “Jathor.” The title comes from a nickname used by Maxwell’s stepson; the tune itself alternates between the relaxed opening theme and the more aggressive second strain; pianist Matt Nelson conjures up a whirlwind of activity in his solo, after which Maxwell pushes into a dizzying badlands that references free jazz and fusion. “It’s kind of how I see my stepson,” he explains, “in the way we change styles and weave through the melody. Like most kids, he’s great one minute and kind of insane the next.” With its similar range of emotion, Maxwell’s sound binds these contradictions together.
Like many artists, Maxwell looks for inspiration to the people and events in his life. He wrote “Ava” as a waltz for his infant daughter – “because when we dance around, we waltz, and when I count 1-2-3, it just cracks her up” – and “Five” for his wife, on the occasion of their fifth anniversary. “Five” is quite unusual: despite the success of songs in 5/4 rhythm (“Take Five” and “Mission Impossible,” for instance), there are almost no ballads in this meter. (But if you find a lovelier slow dance in Chicago this year, please let me know.) Here too, the song benefits from Maxwell’s multi-dimensional sound, which turns from pudding to rock salt and back again, as the tune requires.
Maxwell’s smarts show through on “Shuffled,” in which the alto, piano, and drums create a heady three-part polyphony; on “Sector 7-G” (named for Homer Simpson’s work locale), he injects some funk; and on “Dangerous Curve” he lets it all flow, in a solo that brims with the twists and turns suggested by the title. In almost every case, he keeps the blues handy – even when crafting a tough-as-nails statement on the modernist changes of “Different Colors Of Cool.”
Throughout the disc, Maxwell’s House displays a vibrant and steadily maturing quartet. The youthful Nelson emerges here (and on the standout Chicago Sessions disc by guitarist Aaron Koppel) as one of Chicago’s most promising jazzmen, and one of the freshest pianists on the national scene. Nelson deserves his own disc soon; like his twenty-something contemporary Gerald Clayton, he already know how to leave things out of his solos to highlight the ideas he chooses to retain – a lesson most musicians don’t learn until much later in life.
The Maxwell-Nelson collaboration goes back five years, to when Maxwell first assembled a working quartet. “I just happened to get Matt’s number, from a friend of a friend of a friend,” recalls Maxwell. “When he got on the band, it was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. It really started to push things. With Matt, the band evolved into something much better, although for a couple years there, he just really kicked my ass as a player. I got him before anyone really knew him; when I call now, it’s ‘I’m already booked on this date or that date.’ The word is out,” laughs Maxwell.
Nelson has also served as the band’s unofficial contractor, bringing both Kevin Martinez (bass) and Brandon Dickert (drums) into the fold as openings arose. “They’re friends of Matt from high school, north of Chicago,” Maxwell explains. “And they were roommates for a while, too.” That helps explain the tightly bound interplay in the rhythm section; a dozen years of friendship en route to adulthood will do that for a trio.
Maxwell shares suburban midwestern roots with his cohorts. Born and bred in Joliet, IL, he graduated from Millikin University in Decatur in 1999, then moved 175 miles north to Chicago to perform and teach. A few years later, he headed 45 miles west to North Aurora to raise a family; there he started jobbing regularly, but also established a small circuit of clubs in which to play jazz. “We do a lot of stuff in the ’burbs,” he explains. “The pay is sometimes better, and it’s easier to get into the venues; and maybe it’s the lack of other live music out here, but they really seem to love us.” (Maxwell’s self-deference aside, this might have less to do with the quantity of the competition than it does with the quality of this music.)
As for the title Maxwell’s House, “Ever since I started teaching, people would always misspell both my first and last names. I’ve seen like twelve different spellings of ‘Shawn,’ if you can believe it; and even with ‘Maxwell,’ people would leave out the ‘w.’ So I started telling them ‘Maxwell, just like the coffee’; and then we started joking about being at ‘Maxwell’s house,’ and so on.
“It’s funny though,” he adds; “I don’t even drink coffee.”
